George Floyd and The Upstanders
George Floyd and The Upstanders
Featuring a Wavemaker Conversation with a reporter investigating cases like Floyd's across the nation
On May 25th, 2020, the Minneapolis Police Department issued a press release with the following headline about an encounter that evening.
Man Dies After Medical Incident During Police Interaction
This week that initial press release, about the death of George Floyd, went viral.
What makes the verbatim so riveting, is how far it was from the truth — that officer Derek Chauvin murdered George Floyd by kneeling on his neck while Floyd was handcuffed, face down, for 9 minutes and 29 seconds.
Man Dies After Medical Incident During Police Interaction
May 25, 2020 (MINNEAPOLIS) On Monday evening, shortly after 8:00 pm, officers from the Minneapolis Police Department responded to the 3700 block of Chicago Avenue South on a report of a forgery in progress. Officers were advised that the suspect was sitting on top of a blue car and appeared to be under the influence.
Two officers arrived and located the suspect, a male believed to be in his 40s, in his car. He was ordered to step from his car. After he got out, he physically resisted officers. Officers were able to get the suspect into handcuffs and noted he appeared to be suffering medical distress. Officers called for an ambulance. He was transported to Hennepin County Medical Center by ambulance where he died a short time later.
At no time were weapons of any type used by anyone involved in this incident.
The Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension has been called in to investigate this incident at the request of the Minneapolis Police Department.
No officers were injured in the incident.
Body worn cameras were on and activated during this incident.
The GO number associated with this case is 20-140629.
I reached out to the person whose tweet helped make that document go viral — a veteran local news reporter in Denver named Chris Vanderveen.
He shared it after the verdict was announced, as a way of reminding fellow journalists:
Always keep in the back of your mind that the original narrative can sometimes not be the full narrative. Whether it's right or wrong … it's not necessarily the full story.
Vanderveen’s determination to ask probing questions of original narratives has led him to uncover other cases like George Floyd’s — many others. More on his continuing investigation in a moment.
The Upstander
The truth of what happened on May 25, 2020 was not exposed by a journalist. It was exposed by a teenager named Darnella Frazier.
Frazier is the seventeen year old girl, in the blue pants, third from right in the image below, who pulled out her cell phone outside the Cup Foods convenience store when she saw what was happening to George Floyd, and started recording.
Darnella Frazier decided not to be a bystander.
By holding her camera steady, for ten minutes, in the face of fear, and testifying about it in court, she was an upstander.
That term, upstander, was coined by Samantha Power, the former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations and author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning book A Problem From Hell, about genocide in the twentieth century.
The context was different. But not the essence — which involves “questions about the nature of individual responsibility in the face of injustice.”
“Every day,” Power writes in her recent memoir, “almost all of us find ourselves weighing whether we can or should do something to help others. We decide, on issues large and small, whether we will be bystanders or upstanders.”
“The world needed to see what I was seeing,” Darnella Frazier told the Minneapolis Star-Tribune. “Stuff like this happens in silence too many times."
It’s A Pattern
Chris Vanderveen has been working to break that silence.
Vanderveen is the Director of Reporting at KUSA TV’s 9News in Denver.
He has been building a database of “prone restraint deaths” — cases, like George Floyd’s, in which people who have been arrested have died while handcuffed, on their stomachs, with officers on top of them.
His count is up to 116. The victims are disproportionately Black and other people of color.
He has screened hours upon hours of police body cam footage — counting the amount of time that officers remained on top of handcuffed people in the prone position.
So I'm looking at our times right now, I've got 16 minutes and 52 seconds, 22 minutes, 3 minutes and 55 seconds, 9 minutes and 12 seconds, 14 minutes and 19 seconds. These are other cases that people aren't aware of. These are not household names.
How did police report on these other cases? What narratives were used to explain these deaths?
In our 12-minute Wavemaker Conversation, Vanderveen reveals the patterns he has uncovered.
We know what happened to George Floyd.
He is not alone.
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